


Piper spp.

by Remeinhu



Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: Fluff and Humor, Gen, Grocery Shopping, History Jokes, History nerdery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:08:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25425139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Remeinhu/pseuds/Remeinhu
Summary: Getting used to the twenty-first century when you lived and died in the sixteenth century involves a lot of adjustments--from major things like new systems of government and medicine, to apparently minor things, like the low price of spices.Sometimes it's the minor things that are hardest to wrap one's head around, as Catalina and the others learn when they go grocery shopping for the first time since coming back.Hilarity ensues.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 83





	Piper spp.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CynicalRainbows](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CynicalRainbows/gifts).



> Based on a headcanon @CynicalRainbows came up with while discussing the queens' relationships to present-day food: that because they were so used to spices being incredibly valuable, they didn't quite trust that they'd remain so cheap and had therefore decided to squirrel away a "pepper stash" while they could.
> 
> This, clearly, needed its own fic.

Catalina thought, all things considered, that she’d handled her highly unexpected transition from the sixteenth century to the twenty first century with grace and aplomb. With the help of her fellow queens and the devices called _phones_ that seemed to have all the information one could ever want available at the swipe of a fingertip, she’d come to terms with the radical changes in technology, politics, language, medicine, and even theology with a speed that surprised even her. Given her (unfair) historical reputation as the stubborn, inflexible traditionalist, she thought she could be forgiven just a little pride in this.

Nevertheless, that didn’t mean _everything_ went down so easily. Indeed, it was sometimes smaller, incidental matters that caught Catalina and the others off guard and made them feel as though they were explorers visiting otherworldly realms.

She’d discovered one of these…sticking points on their first venture out to a place called the _grocery store._ And even then, the sticking point was smaller than might be expected. It wasn’t the bright lights, or the hum of the _refrigerators,_ or the riotous packaging, or the seemingly infinite variety of foodstuffs available for purchase that made Catalina snap.

It was the price of pepper.

The _ridiculously, foolishly, ruinously LOW _price of pepper.

Actually, it wasn’t even the price that Catalina noticed first. It was the fact that the pepper—and the cloves! And cinnamon! And nutmeg!—were just…sitting out on the shelf for _any_ common thief to make off with.

In retrospect, she realized, she should have known something was off when they’d rounded the corner and seen an aisle labeled “Baking and Spices.” And, indeed, she was suspicious as they moved down the aisle. Why on earth would spices of any kind be out on open shelving? Wouldn’t any sensible merchant keep them in a storeroom and carefully measure them out to each customer? It wasn’t until they pulled their trolley up next to the expanse of small, aromatic bottles and tins, however, that she registered the full extent of the problem.

Or, rather, Anna did, at first:

“That can’t be right.” She peered quizzically at the shelf, then looked back at the others. “It says this jar of pepper costs only—” she squinted at it again, to be sure she hadn’t misread—“two pounds fifty…?” She trailed off in confusion.

“What?” Catalina snapped to attention. “Let me see that!” She bustled around the trolley to squat down next to Anna and read the printed prices, certain Anna had misread, or she’d misheard. But no, there it was, in front of her distressingly clear eyes:

Pepper, black, 99 g: **£** 2.50

And, nearby:

Nutmeg, ground, 52 g: **£** 0.85

Cinnamon, stick, 13 g: **£** 1.25

Cloves, whole, 30g: **£** 0.85

Mace powder, 37 g: **£** 1.20

“What on earth!” Catalina shook her head in a vain attempt to clear it.

“Perhaps things have changed with spices?” Kitty ventured uncertainly.

“They can’t have changed _that_ much!” Jane exclaimed. “Heavens, one of the things that distinguished the royal table from the others was the free hand with spices!” She looked rather unsteady.

“Clearly,” Catalina pronounced, “something is badly wrong in this store. And since no one else has seemed to notice, I can only assume it is our responsibility to bring the matter to someone’s attention before the store becomes insolvent and the poor, what was it, Tesco family loses their business and livelihood.”

(It should be noted, at this point, that while the queens _had_ managed to wrap their heads around the substantial inflation of the currency during the centuries since they had last been alive, they had not yet had the opportunity to grasp the series of upheavals in England’s very economic structure. Soon enough, they would come to understand concepts like _multinational publicly traded corporations, franchises, multilateral free trade agreements,_ and _economies of scale_ , all of which, by the way, had antecedents with which they would have been quite familiar, but at this point that day had not yet arrived.

Really, they’d only just come to grips with germ theory, which was already _a lot._ They crave your patience and hope you won’t laugh _too_ much at their expense. Although they’ll admit, in retrospect, that the whole thing really _was_ pretty funny).

Fortuitously, at that moment Catalina spotted someone who looked like a clerk. At least, the fellow seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform, and he was unloading various items from boxes and putting them on the shelves. She marched over to him.

“Sir? Oh sir?” She waved politely (she hoped, anyway).

“Can I help you, miss?”

“Yes, thank you, and pardon my interruption. But I fear that there’s a massive error in your pricing. Come—” she beckoned imperiously, striding back to the spices—“look here. Don’t you see that the pepper, and several of the others, are _clearly_ mislabled?”

The fellow looked at the shelf, scratched his head, then looked back at her as though she’d just informed him that she and the others had arrived from the moon and could he take them to his leader?

Catalina completely misunderstood his expression as one of commiseration, however. “You see? It’s preposterous. There’s no way it should cost this little.” She spread her hands in a gesture of—she wasn’t sure what, actually, but she hoped it made her look kind and reasonable.

The man just shook his head. “Miss, those prices look correct to me.”

Catalina crossed her arms. “Please, check them. I should hate for the proprietor to become insolvent! And while I’m at it, shouldn’t these spices be in a locked cabinet? Aren’t you worried about someone just stealing them? It seems as though the loss of the pepper alone could ruin you!”

The clerk looked _massively_ skeptical, but he did point the strange device he was holding at some odd vertical lines on the back of one of the jars. It made a beeping sound as he consulted a screen on the top of it. He sighed. “Miss, that price is correct. The pepper costs two pounds fifty for the jar. And honestly—” did he have the nerve to sound _exasperated_ with her?!—"there are items that are much worse targets for shoplifting. Pretty much no one just steals a jar of pepper.”

“That _can’t be_ right!” Catalina exclaimed, brandishing another one of the little jars wildly enough that she nearly smacked Anne in the head with it. “Do you realize that kingdoms started actual _wars_ over this? Kingdoms sent fleets on treacherous voyages of exploration across uncharted oceans to get access to the lands that produced it! People used to carry little personal pouches of the stuff that they had to make last an entire sea voyage! There was”—it was vaguely possible she might have been shouting by this point—“a time when this _pepper_ was worth its weight in gold!”

She’d have kept going, but the clerk had the absolute gall to cut her off. “Miss, I promise you that price is correct!” He sounded slightly frightened, and his voice actually rose into a squeak. “May I get back to what I was doing now?”

“CATHY!” Catalina bellowed at her goddaughter, who, although she’d been listening peripherally, had nevertheless had her nose in a book for much of the exchange. “Please tell this man his machine is _clearly_ broken!” But by the time Cathy looked up, the poor fellow had scuttled off to a different aisle.

“Botheration!” Catalina was thoroughly flustered, and she anxiously fingered the jar of pepper she’d been wielding.

“How very odd,” Anne, who had been passively watching the whole exchange by Kitty’s side, muttered. “You’d think he’d at least take the question seriously.” Kitty, Cathy, and Anna all nodded.

Jane, however, had a glint in her eye.

“Catalina,” she began, “clearly this is strange, but everyone seems to be going along with it for now. We know how very, very valuable this is, though—the error can’t go uncorrected forever, and the price will _surely_ return to where it ought to be soon enough. Perhaps we should buy a…strategic reserve? After all, it doesn’t seem as though we have any recognizable claim to royal or even noble status anymore, and we also seem to lack marketable skills in this new world. But if we had a reserve of pepper, we could at least have _something_ of value hidden away for difficult times.”

Catalina eyed her thoughtfully. “I hate to think about helping to defraud the poor storekeeper, but you do have a point.” She pursed her lips. “All right. Let’s buy…hm. What about half a kilogram of pepper at this price? And perhaps several jars each of the whole cloves and cinnamon sticks?” Anne and Kitty had already started emptying the shelves into the trolley.

The checkout clerk gave them an odd look, but said nothing. Nevertheless, they remained rather skittish until they’d gotten the goods into the kitchen and locked and bolted the door behind them.

“All right.” Catalina leveled a steely gaze at each of them in turn. “I’m going to place these at the back of the top corner cabinet over there. I expect each of you to do your part in checking daily to be sure they’re still there and keeping anyone who might come visit from discovering where they are, let alone stealing them. Can I count on you?”

For once, there was no tension, no quips or cheeky banter. Everyone knew the value of their precious cargo. The “yesses” were quick and unanimous.

And that was how the six reincarnated queens came into possession of what they began to call “the Pepper Stash.” Eventually, of course, they acclimated to the new economic reality they lived in, but nevertheless the Pepper Stash, long after it had become a bit of a running joke in the household, seemed still to possess some sort of uncanny properties of reassurance. Even years later, you might find Jane or Catalina, if they’d had a particularly trying day, standing on a stool in the kitchen in the dead of night, shining the flashlight of their phone into the depths of the upper cabinet, gazing at the softly illuminated jars of spice, and smiling beatifically.

For such, even five hundred years on, is the value and the power and the glory of pepper.

**Author's Note:**

> It seems to be debatable whether pepper was ever consistently valued weight-for-weight with gold, but the claim also seems like the kind of hyperbole Catalina might be moved to in that particular moment to impress the gravity of her claim on the poor, unsuspecting clerk, so I ran with it.
> 
> The value of pepper, as it happens, was actually JUST starting to go down slightly throughout the 16th century as more European powers charted sea routes to the Indian subcontinent and the spice islands, and as monopolies were broken. Nevertheless, it was still quite pricey. Even more than a century after the queens lived, in 1668, a pound of pepper cost over three times what the average laborer earned in a week. It wasn't until the next decade that the price of pepper in Europe saw its first truly major decline. (See Lizzie Collingham, "The Taste of Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World," 2017, ch.6, at fns. 17-18).
> 
> The detail about sailors having personal stashes of pepper is based on the excavation of Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose, which tipped over and sank, rather unceremoniously, just out of harbor in the early stages of a naval engagement in 1545, and which is DEFINITELY NOT a metaphor for anything. Apparently many of the sailors whose remains were recovered carried small personal stashes of peppercorns with them. (See again Collingham, 2017, ch.6, at fn. 21).


End file.
